Sneak Peak

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Key Art of Goo Island

Written By:

Ned

The great thing about this kind of stuff is the briefs are usually pretty loose, so I get a lot of freedom to come up with fairly crazy ideas.

The character of the 'Infinite Sadness' is a fun one to play around with, since it has no real set physical appearance. I decided it would be cool to appear as a sort of all enveloping goo or thick sticky smoke.

DH keyart thumbs ned 002

My first set of thumbs, were kind of all over the place but I guess the idea of the rabbits puttering around on a little scooter must have seemed funny to me at some point, since it remained through the rest of the thumbs. And speaking of the thumbs, I don't usually start thumbnails as value studies, but when everything in a painting is either goo or smoke, it really is a lot easier than using lines.

Out of this bunch it was decided that we'd make 2 posters, the top right and top left (more on the top right later).

Since I already had the beginnings of a value study in the thumbnail, I blew the thumb up and started refining over the top. I threw colour into the mix fairly early as I was sure I'd be using a fairly simple two tone palette and wanted to avoid having to do a complex colouring job on top of a value study, which usually means a lot more work. Conversely if you start thinking about colour before you have the base values worked out, you can end up in a lot of trouble down the line, so it pays to be careful either way!

DH keyart colourthumb 01

The corrupted gorilla thing was a fun diversion from the rest of the painting, and helped replace the little critters from the thumbnail as a way of showing the threat of the Eternal Sadness. I did like the original smokey version, but smoothing him down seemed to make more sense, as the goo is slick and shiny, so an animal corrupted by it probably would be too.

I had also originally hoped to have a lot more tendrils grabbing onto the island in the middle, but it ended up looking way too busy so I decided to cut back to just a few thicker ones.

This painting went pretty smoothly all the way through, with the exception of the scooter, which probably had about 4 different starts. My original ladybug design quickly fell flat, and with my only direction being “Make sure it doesn't look like a Vespa”, I think I eventually ended pushing a whole bunch of shapes together until something popped out. Occasionally running around with your eyes closed is the best way to figure out a design.

With a few extra details and some big vapour trails coming out of the 'scooter' it was ready for Chris to add the rabbits and we could call it done.

DH keyart scooter 01 005